I'm glad to share that I've registered to vote in New York. I'm glad not just because I'm a West-Wing-watching sap who believes that voting is a civic responsibility as well as a personal privilege, but also because we live in terrifying times and face an election of terrifying stakes.

It's still a closer race here than in Maryland, which FiveThirtyEight claims is 99.8% likely to go Clinton.

I'm a West-Wing-watching sap who believes that voting is a civic responsibility as well as a personal privilege.

I'm going to be trading my vote with a third-party voter in a swing state.

"I'm sorry, what?"

(1)

Scott Aaronson laid out the case for vote-swapping exceedingly well in a recent blog post, so I won't re-hash the matter here. Suffice it to say (for those who can't be bothered to click through that link)

If you hadn't heard: A group that was almost certainly Russian military intelligence stole almost 20,000 emails from the DNC and Wikileaks published them on Saturday. Personally, I doubt that there's anything in them, but---

---what's that?---

---they're literally the smoking gun of a plot to steal the nomination for Hillary Cl---

---no, no, I'm certain that they're not---

---um---

---okay, okay, I'll take a look and see what's there. Here we go.

attention conservation notice: This post is long. Like, 7000 words long. If you just want to skip to the executive summary at the end, I won't blame you. There, I go over the material that I cover below with convenient links back to the relevant section, if at any point you want to go back and check against source.

(1a)

In a conversation with an acquaintance about the political ethics of voting for Jill Stein, I realized that I had very little idea what the Green Party stood for. (Um...the environment?) So I spent a few hours today reading the Green Party platform. I can't say it was an exciting experience, but now at least I feel like I have some sense of what it means to be Green. I liked a good deal of what I read, but in the end, there were a few things that I just couldn't stomach.

note: At no point in this post am I going to discuss the political ethics of voting for a third-party candidate, in general, in a first-past-the-post race. If you want to read about that sort of thing, you're in the wrong place; this is a post unpacking what the Green Party specifically does and does not (claim to) stand for.

(1)

1. There's actually a good deal to like about the Green platform. It's pro-UBI, (mostly)

note: Long after I posted this, PredictIt changed their policies on margin requirements in "linked markets", a small step towards market efficiency. Nevertheless, they left in place their 5% tax on withdrawals and 10% tax on gross profits, so the central argument that inefficiencies can stop even the most commonsense arbitrages from correcting out-of-line markets, remains largely true.

(1)

Political betting site PredictIt offers everyone the ability to (legally) bet (real money) on the outcome of political events. For example:

You can pay 39¢ for a Yes share in BUSH.RNOM16, which will be worth $1 if Jeb Bush wins the Republican nomination, and $0 if he does not. Similarly, you can pay 63¢ for a No share in BUSH.RNOM16, which will be worth $0 if he wins and $1 otherwise. (Another way to think about this is that you can sell a Yes share for 37¢ or buy one for 39¢. These numbers are different for pretty much the same reason that you can't sell your used textbooks

(a)

Open borders? No, that's a ... proposal ... which says essentially there is no United States...

It would make everybody in America poorer -- you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help [our] poor people. What some people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs...

I think from a moral responsibility we've got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international

(0a)

On the one hand, I sympathize with his goals. If you can’t get any job better than 'fast food worker' without a college degree, and poor people can’t afford college degrees, that’s a pretty grim situation, and obviously unfair to the poor.

...

But, well, when we require doctors to get a college degree before they can go to medical school, we’re throwing out [$5 billion], enough to house all the homeless people in the country... Senator Sanders admits that his plan would cost $70 billion per year. That's... enough to give $2000 every year to every American in poverty.

At what point do we say "Actually, no, let's not do that, and just let people hold basic jobs even if they don't cough up a a hundred thousand dollars from somewhere to get a degree in Medieval